MediaWiki is very good, but for programming tasks editing it via the web is not very handy since WYSIWYG is very limited. Pressing 'edit' + 'publish' on any small change and waiting for page loading is kind of annoying. I have seen a lot of desktop wikis (personal wikis) that are free from such problems. The best example is WikidPad that has a usage pattern of 'focus, edit wiki in-place, minimize'. This is very handy for programming work where you need to make small changes to wiki and documentation during development, and documentation is written much more often than read :). But all such desktops wikis are personal - they don't have any wiki sharing (or marginally limited support for it).

So, maybe a desktop application exists that can connect to MediaWiki and allows to view and edit it via a rich WYSIWYG editor? Any hints are welcomed.

6 Answers
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Not really. For an explanation and a list of imperfect options, read this page.

However, you might not need a WYSIWYG editor in order to make many quick edits to a wiki. It is possible to download the wikitext of a page, edit it locally, and submit the changes. There are scripts (called bots) available which do this. One example is pywikipediabot's "editarticle.py" script. You might also want to take a look at AutoWikiBrowser.

We use the FCK Editor. It is not perfect (changing between that and the standard editor can lead to formating changes) but it does enable copy and pasting from Office documentation. This is particularly useful with tables, which MediaWiki makes such a drama out of.